The culture in which we grow up has a strong influence on our understanding of love and relationships.
Polina Aronson Journalist, sociologist, lecturer at Alice University of Applied Sciences Salomon in Berlin. Graduated from St. Petersburg State University.
In 1996, when I was 16 years old, I went abroad for the first time. For a year I studied at one of the US schools. My parents were delighted with the prospects opening up for me. And I could only think about one thing: finding an American boyfriend.
I found a stack of Seventeen girls' magazines in the school library. I wanted to understand what happens between American girls and boys when they like each other. I studied many articles on how to choose a guy, took various tests in magazines and learned new unusual words. Even Russian multi-volume novels cannot compete with the complexity of Seventeen magazine's romance system.
I was struck by the difference between the concept of love in the environment in which I grew up, and the exoticism and frankness that I encountered in America. In Russia, a boy and a girl fell in love and met, and the rest was shrouded in mystery.
To understand our understanding of love, sociologists analyze the language of popular magazines, television shows and self-help books, and interview men and women from different countries. According to them, our idea of love is influenced by political, economic and social factors. Together they lead to the establishment of romantic modes that determine how we talk about our feelings, our normal behavior, and who we are willing to give our love to.
The American girl that Seventeen is intended for was raised in a mode of choice. She keeps her emotions within the limits of her needs and rights, choosing the best match for herself. The Russian girl was brought up on classical literature, which explains love as a kind of supernatural force that appears by magic and is sometimes destructive to life. In other words, I, like every Russian girl, was raised in the mode of fate.
However, in modern Russia, as in Western countries, the mode of choice often prevails. We have entered an era of selfishness. The lover has displaced the beloved from the foreground. We worry not about the object of love, but about ourselves. The main goal of the choice mode is to protect and protect your fragile self. Many modern self-development books and psychological trainings are aimed at this.
The modern ideal of a relationship can be characterized as follows: two independent individuals moving towards a healthy relationship, satisfying each other's emotional needs until they find someone else.
In the mode of choosing to love someone too much , too early, too passionately – this is a sign of infantilism. This mode does not allow us to love to the detriment of our own interests.
However, the greatest gift of love is recognizing the unconditional value of another person. Despite the prevailing regime of choice in Russia, for many Russians love still remains a fate that cannot be resisted.
We consider maturity to be the ability to overcome suffering and pain for the sake of love. And sometimes this can reach the point of absurdity. For example, an American who falls in love with a married woman will be advised to quickly break off the relationship with her and undergo therapy. A Russian in a similar situation will burst into this woman’s house and take her straight away from the stove, past crying children and her husband frozen with the remote control in his hand.
Both modes have their pros and cons. Fate mode sometimes encourages us to act contrary to common sense, relying only on emotions. And the mode of choice does not allow us to go beyond our own interests and trust another.
We must return love to its former appearance: an unpredictable force that takes us by surprise. We must dare to cross boundaries and move towards our loved one. We should not be afraid to suffer because of love. After all, to be happy, a person needs another person.
